The present invention relates to hand-held personal computing devices commonly known as hand-held devices or palm-sized devices. More particularly, the present invention relates to Contacts database user interfaces (UIs) for hand-held devices.
Hand-held devices are small electronic computing devices, sometimes also referred to as personal digital assistants (PDAs). Generally, these devices fit comfortably in the palm of a user""s hand. Hand-held devices have gained a niche as personal organizers, allowing users to view or change lists of contacts, tasks or calendar events on a display using an interface device such as a keyboard (typically integrated into a touch sensitive display) and a stylus.
On a hand-held device, screen real estate is limited (both horizontally and vertically). As such, they are only able to display a portion of the information stored on them at any given time. For example, a typical Contacts database stored on a hand-held device has several hundred entries in it, with each entry including addresses, phone numbers and other information. Thus, there is a need for methods of efficiently accessing pertinent contact information on a limited size screen.
The present invention includes apparatus and methods for generating a Contacts information user interface (UI), for a stylus based hand held device, which maximizes the number of contacts initially shown to aid the user in finding the correct entry, and which provides a mechanism to efficiently retrieve the most commonly needed information for each contact entry. According to a first aspect of the invention, while displaying a list of Contacts database entries, the UI displays a column which contains single letters indicating the type of information displayed for the names represented in the list of entries. A tap on a letter in that column causes a sub-list of other commonly accessed information to be deployed for the corresponding entry, potentially eliminating the need for the user to open the entire record to retrieve desired information.
According to a second aspect of the present invention, a tap on the letter of the column results in truncated information displayed on the corresponding line of the list of entries to be displayed as fully as possible in the list of entries.
According to a third aspect of the present invention, a single tap on a row of the sub-list described above results in a change of displayed information on the corresponding row of the list of entries.